Contemplation
by BigDamnHeros
Summary: It was a day she could never forget, but needed to remember. Only when she starts, Alanna isn't so sure she wants to.


It's that night again. An anniversary of sorts I suppose. My love is sleeping, his arms wrapped around me, the beat of his heart is comforting and warm. Ordinarily I would curl up there. One of the few places that I know I am safe, loved, and cherished. However this night is different. This night the memories won't leave me alone.

I press a soft kiss to my husband's lips and slip out from under the covers, and step out on to the balcony. The cold air settles upon me like a blanket in reverse. The chill sweeps up my arms and leg, and clears my mind. And for that I am grateful. I rest my hands on the stone wall of the balcony and recall when we parted.

_It had been a warm night. He had looked at me, smiling slightly. Though his face was tinged a sickly yellow from the feat we were about to accomplish, he stayed strong for me. We said nothing. Both knew what we had to do. He pulled me close, and hugged me tight._

_We only spoke again when we parted._

I should have been more careful, told him that I wanted to keep in touch. But I moved on without a care. I like to think it was because I thought I had my whole future ahead of me. But deep down I know that it was because I never really considered the possibility that I might ever loose him. I should have worried, but I didn't, and that wrong may have been our undoing. The first time I was given I sign however, had been a trivial matter to me at the time, though now it echo's in my head, reverberating on the walls of my mind. Nearly driving my to tears of frustration. The wind makes another cloak of ice to settle apon me, but in my self-loathing, I don't realize this, for a cloak of memories has been donned in favour of the wind, and it's chill leaves the wind behind.

_As the coffin was lowered into the ground, I wondered. Had he known? Had he known the outcome? When I asked he only looked at me; and his eyes were cold, and shut off, in a way they had never been towards my before. When he finally replied his voice frightened me, it was of a petty childish hatred, a hatred that children had when they felt that their own parents couldn't see them. The jealous hatred of an older sibling to a younger; a possessive hatred that takes root in the depths of you heart, and never truly goes away. He said to me "He will never hurt us anymore. He deserved his end. It had been a long time coming."_

_And I know now what I had refused to see then. He had killed him. My father was dead because of him._

Tears sting my eyes, and this time, it isn't the wind, the pain of such knowledge, the fact that I should have seen but didn't, didn't _want_ to see, what was happening to him. I bite my lip, and blink tight to keep the tears at bay, and my mind opens a door to me.

_He was so weak. He looked at me, his eyes slightly crazed, but trusting. Trusting me? Or what I was going to do? I let out a dry sob, my emotion overwhelming me, making me unable to express it the way I wanted to. I wanted to scream, shout, rage at the world because so soon, to soon, he would no longer be in it. I want to cry a river in his honour. But my eyes were dry, and the tears didn't come. "Love you…" he whispers, "always have…" Then he closed his eyes. When I pulled him to me for one final embrace, he felt so light in my arms. Because his spirit was slipping away from me, going somewhere that I couldn't ever bring him back from. And in that moment I hated myself, for the tears still didn't come._

Though they were absent then, they flow freely now. Salty and bitter as the wounds in my heart, they trail down my face to rest on the floor. The pain in my heart it big and wide and my heart feels as though it will never be whole. I keep my sobs silent, my shoulders shaking. I don't want to wake him, this is a battle I must do alone.

As the tears fall, and the hurt and loss rips at my chest like a wild beast, I remember one thing. That though he is gone, though I never truly saw him, though I can never see his face…

I know my brother loved me.

A/N: PLEASE REVIEW! I am just churning these one-shots out like crazy!


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